Static frame compression techniques, such as Block Truncation Codes and JPEG, offer reasonably good performance and compression capabilities. However, these static frame compression techniques are not suited or designed for dealing with a stream of updates to a visual generated by a served application for a client machine in a visual serving system. In a visual serving system, there may be a tremendous amount of information flow passing between a served application and a client machine. In order to provide the necessary interaction capability with a served visual, the latency involved in buffering and compressing large amounts of data needs to be avoided. Therefore, it is desirable to reduce traffic associated with served visuals between a server and a client.